Posts tagged Harry Potter
The Boy Who Lived: What We Can Learn From Harry Potter - Part II
The Boy Who Lived: What We Can Learn From Harry Potter - Part II

Picking up where we left off last time, the second article that I assigned for the last week of my Popular Culture class this year looked at the place of celebrity culture inside and outside of Harry Potter.

Parry-Giles (2011) argues that the Harry Potter franchise (and character) represents a critique of celebrity culture while relying on the consumption celebrity culture to gain popularity. He identifies three dichotomies present within and around the series - celebrity and hero, image and reality, and fake and authentic - and notes that the series author J.K. Rowling has frequently expressed her discomfort with being a celebrity and the struggle of maintaining a private life. These themes and tensions are explored in this post!

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TeachingJennifer DumoulinHarry Potter, Popular Culture, Celebrity, Celebrity Culture
The Sorting Hat: What We Can Learn From Harry Potter - Part I
The Sorting Hat: What We Can Learn From Harry Potter - Part I

With the continued success of the Harry Potter series - in February 2018, it was announced that more than 500 million copies of the novels had been sold, in 80 languages (in addition to 8 feature films, endless merchandising, video games, and a theme park) - it is not surprising that the franchise has been the subject of much academic study. Among other things, it has been analyzed from the perspective of gender, class, and race, focusing on themes of injustice, prejudice, wealth, and slavery.

This blog post looks at the accuracy of the outcome of the sorting quiz (and the characteristics associated with each house) with the personality traits identified in real-world assessments like the Big Five personality quiz, and what we can learn about ourselves and others through popular culture.

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TeachingJennifer DumoulinHarry Potter, Metaphor, Identity, Literature, Popular Culture